Various Writings by Jay Hinman

The Return of Blogging

Blogging! It really sounds quite ridiculous in 2017, doesn’t it? Outside of the corporate sphere, in which keeping a blog is just sort of one of those things you have to do, people moved on from blogs at least half a decade ago, and then some.

Thing is, I never really got over ’em, even as everything shifted to social media and/or to longform writing on spaces like Medium and the like. The notion of following a blog, or of keeping one, was really a big part of web and writing/reading culture 10-15 years ago, but to say it now pegs one as a bit of fogey. Like me.

Anyway, I set up this particular site as a place to dump whatever, whenever. Hate-screeds about Donald Trump, “short pieces of longform”, scans of my 1990s fanzine and so on. I’ve decided to maybe narrow the mission a little bit, and focus The Word Goes Flesh on the written word – both my written words, and those of others.

This means I’ll get back into the swing of reviewing the books I’m reading again, which is something I did for pleasure for a while, both as a way to work out my reactions to them and to help me remember what they were actually about. I made a January 2017 resolution to read at least 35 books by the end of the year, and so far I’m somehow making good on that pace.

I’m also a ravenous consumer of longform pieces of journalism, first-person narratives, interviews, navel-gazing polemics and “think pieces” in many forms. I think maybe I’ll comment on those here as well, and offer up some helpful links to my many, many readers.

Maybe it’s also that I’m trying to suck myself away from Twitter, where I’ve been all too consumed with engorging myself with the countless ways in which I loathe the current President of the United States. It’s not good for me. I know that. (I’m still part of the #Resistance, though – don’t worry).